Category: geek

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Cool gadget, cool site

On the new gadget front I am just about to get a Nokia N80 phone as my contract is up with T-Mobile, after being with T-Mobile for over 7 years I’m about to jump ship over to Orange instead, they had a really good deal on offer coupled with having the Nokia N80 so that sold it to me.

What’s cool about the N80? Well, it’s got (amongst other things!):

Pictue of Nokia N80 phone

  • Integrated 3 megapixel camera (2048 x 1536 pixels)
  • High-quality video capture in MP4 and 3GP formats with up to 5x digital zoom, Video capture resolutions: 352 x 288; 176 x 144 pixels
  • Image and video uploading to the Web
  • S60 3rd Edition software on Symbian OS
  • Integrated digital music player with stereo audio. Supported file formats: MP3, AAC, m4a, eAAC+ and wma
  • Stereo FM radio
  • Multimedia player (RealPlayer) with 3GPP & MPEG4 AVC video streaming support
  • Internet browser (Based on Safari’s WebKit core)
  • Integrated Wireless LAN (802.11g) and UPnP (Universal Plug and Play)
  • Bluetooth wireless technology
  • Infrared
  • Pop-Port? interface with USB 2.0 Full Speed with mass storage class

So, it’s pretty cool! : )

I came across a cool site called ‘We Feel Fine‘ which is an interesting idea, it’s more of an artwork than an application, on the site they say:

At the core of We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.

We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. This is an approach that was inspired by techniques used in Listening Post, a wonderful project by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.

Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.

Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”. This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs.

It’s pretty cool, go check it out, www.wefeelfine.org/

~Rick

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iPod R.I.P.

Yes, despite my best efforts to cure it, my 40gb iPod is dead! : (

I tried restoring it, reformatting it, etc etc yadayadayada… but nothing worked. It’s now going off to take a visit to UKiPodRepairs.com to see if they can do anything else with it. I reckon the hard drive is toast which is at least £150 to fix, I’d sooner buy a new iPod I reckon. Ah well.

iPod RIP

 

~Rick

 

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The importance of cross-platform testing

Well, in my new mission to post on this blog regularly I have gone and created a nice new blog widget for the purpose of quick and easy posting to the site. It’s working pretty well but I still can’t figure out how to save preferences in widgets, it just doesn’t seem to work. Perseverance needed!

With all the hoohaa about Apple’s Bootcamp software that allows you to run windows going on I thought it best to test and see what happens to sites when viewed using Bootcamp.

I chose my friend Alyn’s Blog as a test subject, here’s the results:

So, you can see that sites do look quite remarkably different when using Bootcamp.

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A strange experiment…

Well, not really an experiment, more a consequence… Huh? well, I previously blogged about dropping my laptop, it’s now away getting looked at and I’m not sure if it will get fixed or replaced. Anyway, it means we could be without a computer at home for a month!!!

So, Annie and I are treating this as an interesting experience, it’s funny how often you jump on the web to check out something or your email. When you can’t do it it’s kind of weird.

On the plus side it means we should have more time to do some work on the house ;) or watch cable.

~Rick

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Insomnia, Insomnia, Insaawwwwmnia…

Mmm, can’t seem to get to sleep tonight, I stayed up late watching TV, then when I went to bed I couldn’t sleep (Darn Start Trek Voyager! Somebody just get rid of the Holodec already, it’s always causing trouble…).

So I thought I’d wander around downstairs for a bit, then I remembered I hadn’t blogged since last week. Well, what’s happened since then? MacWorld San Francisco came and went and gave us some interesting goodies from Apple, new iMac and new ‘MacBook Pro‘ laptops (the name does grow on you, but the impending loss of the ‘PowerBook‘ brand is hard to take a bit).

Mr. Powerbook, meet Mr. Floor.

On the subject of Powerbooks, unfortunately my 4 year old Titanium PowerBook G4 had a bit of an accident last Sunday, I was about to leave the house to head down to The Gate with it in my bag when the strap came unclipped and it went, “thuuummmp.” to the floor. The words, “Oh crap” came to mind.

I didn’t check it until I got down the road, I took it out and, yep, a big crack on the left hand corner of the upper titanium casing with a couple of smaller cracks at other points. The bottom of the case at the corner was peeling back and had a bent bit pushed out where something inside had squeezed out. I managed to push it back in a bit and pushed the bottom of the case up into place a bit.

Fortunately the machine still works, it came awake quite happily when I opened it up and it seems to work ok. It just looks pretty wrecked now! Kind of a sad thing to happen after all the hard work we’ve done together! Hopefully it should be covered by my business insurance but I’m not sure how that will work out because of the age of the machine.

Nursery rhymes with, um… Penguin?

…Well, Natalie started Nursery last week, she goes every morning from 8.50am until 11.20am. She was really excited about starting and she’s really enjoyed it. There’s been a lot of painting and art going on, so any relatives or friends are liable to be gifted with some genuine Natalie artwork! It’s been fun getting up in the morning with Natalie around as Natalie and Annie were usually asleep when I got up for work before. Now Natalie comes shuffling through to our room when she hears our alarm go off. It’s very cute when she appears still in her grobag having negotiated the stairs still wearing it!!!

Today Annie took Natalie to see the movie ‘March of the Penguins‘ at the DCA, Natalie enjoyed it mostly but they left early as Natalie said, “I is a bit bored now Mummy”. It was a bit slow for the length of movie so it’s maybe not surprising. Oh, and apparently Morgan Freeman needed to just shut up for a bit so we could hear the antarctic instead. I think that’s what Annie said anyway! :) I’ve still never been to the movies with Natalie yet, although this was only her second time having watched Madagascar previously.

Sunday Morning Live Saturday Night Live

After what seems like ages we finally managed to go live for the first time last Sunday broadcasting the church service at The Gate. It was a small scale start with only a 160 x 120 pixel MPEG4 movie stream but it seemed to work pretty well.

Our main limitation just now is that our broadband connection only has 256kb upload capacity which limits us as the church already does an audio broadcast too. However, we should be getting an additional connection purely for the video feed and this will also have a 512kb upload, so hopefully we’ll be able to do a 320 x 240 pixel stream soon.

If you want to check it out go to The Gate website and click on the ‘Live Audio’ link and you’ll see the links for the audio and video streams. They are only active on Sunday morning between about 10.30am – 1pm UK time. That’s an approximate timescale, the meeting runs from 11am until about 12.30pm but sometimes it runs over a bit.

There will also be an archive of previous weeks audio and video which are already in the larger format, I’m still working on the system for that though.

If anyone is interested in the technical details of how this all works then here’s a quick overview of the setup used:

Internal encoding kit:

  • Apple Mac Mini (1gb Ram) OSX 10.4
  • 160gb External Firewire RAID array
  • Miglia Analogue to Digital converter
  • 17″ LCD monitor
  • Wirecast software

External Broadcast server:

And finally…

I just wrote quite a bit there, that’s about it for now though really. Oh yeah, the out-door concrete skatepark is almost finished now, go to www.dundeeconcrete.com to check it out, hopefully another couple of weeks or so and then I can skate it!

Let’s hope I can sleep now…

Good night ;) z z z z z z z z

~Rick

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If you’re going to San Francisco…

Well, I’d like to be there today anyway!

Why?

MacWorld San Francisco 2006 of course!!!

It’s that time of year when every MacGeek get’s all excited wondering what new stuff Apple will announce! You know it’s ominous when you try to access the Apple Store UK and you get this screen:

Apple Store UK Splash screen

So what’s new?

I’m just keeping an eye on Macrumorslive.com where there are up to the moment text updates about Steve Jobs keynote talk, this is where all the goodies get announced, so far there’s a new remote control with FM tuner for the iPod, I’ll update this post in a little while with some more info!!!

Ok, another update, New iMac’s running intel processors, and also a new laptop now called the ‘MacBook’ running on intel too! ooh, baby!

If you’ve ver thought about buying a Mac then now is a good time!

~Rick

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Inspired design?

Sorry, poor title for this blog post! I just wanted to put an evangelistic web post up, by evangelistic in this case I’m meaning for both ‘standards based’ web design and also just good quality design.

If you’re involved in running a church website, or a site for any kind of Christian organisation or are involved with any kind of graphic design etc for church etc then you really should check out the next couple of websites.

The Godbit Project

Firstly, the Godbit Project, the mission statement of this site is:

The purpose of this site is to help the Church catch up with the rest of the world in adherence to standards given by the World Wide Web Consortium, the governing body of best-practices on the Internet. The majority of Christian web design agencies are using outmoded methods of coding to create websites that the rest of the world would scoff at. Basically, they are stuck in the 1990?s.

That kind of says it all really, and it’s why I’m posting it here. A bit of a call for Christians to be at the cutting edge of things. Hey, I know we’re all ‘followers’ but sometimes we gotta lead too! ;) Go checkout the site, there’s some interesting stuff, I hope you’ll ‘catch the fire’ of standards based design.

Church Marketing Sucks

This next site is one I found linked from Godbit.com, ‘Church Marketing Sucks.com‘ has a broader overall focus of marketing, their mission statement says:

Our mission is to frustrate, educate and motivate the church to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus Christ…

…We love the church, but it needs some help. Typos, cheesy logos, and bad clip art aren’t helping the cause. But snazzy marketing won’t save this ship, either. It’s not about being perfect, but there’s a better way to communicate. It’s authentic, it’s loving, and it knows how to spell.

A lot of food for thought here whether you’re a designer, editor, writer, blogger, publisher, PR dude, whatever. Go check out the site, be challenged, surprised and inspired.

Oh yeah, thanks to those who visited this site recently after visiting Alyn’s blog, glad you could make it!

~Rick

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My wife can no longer be referred to as a ‘MacWidow’…

UrbanDictionary.com defines a MacWidow as:

This is what you call the wife of an Apple Macintosh user. He ends up spending much more time on his Mac than with her!

Well, we recently gave away our PC to some friends so I have been keeping my now slightly ageing powerbook at home. Since then Annie has been getting into using it more and more, once she realised that you could do a lot more in GarageBand than just loop a few sounds together she’s been producing quite a lot of songs with it.

Now, the final evidence that Annie’s no longer a ‘MacWidow’ is that she went to an Apple Seminar called ‘Guitarists and the Mac‘. She came home all excited telling me that she found out:

“How the Mac and Apple?s audio creation software along with some amazing third-party products gives you access to thousands of amplifier emulations and pro-quality effects for rehearsals, studio and stage…”

and also:

“How recent developments in guitar technology turn your favourite axe into a virtual orchestra by giving you access to thousands of sampled sounds, virtual instruments and synthesizers…”

Mmm, if you ask me, she sounds like she’s getting a little bit fanatical about this Mac stuff, next thing she’ll be telling me how “she can’t wait until January for Macworld San Francisco as ThinkSecret says that there will be a new Mac Mini – the first to run on Intel chips – and that it will be part of Apple’s move for the Mac to be the center(sic) of the digital hub in people’s homes…“

I guess I shouldn’t have gotten her that iPod shuffle, seems like I’ve started something… ;)

~Rick

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Essential Reading for Web Designers

I’ve been busy finishing a few projects so I haven’t blogged much recently I know but I’m going to try and pick up the pace a little bit.

I just got a couple of new books from Amazon this week and I’ve now found that I have four books that I look to for cool solutions for the challenges presented by Standards Compliant website design. So I’m putting a little mini-review here of them, despite the fact that I’ve only just started reading one of the books I got this week, it’s just I can tell it’s worth recommending them!

Designing with Web Standards
By Jeffrey Zeldman

Picture of Designing with Web Standards book jacketThis book is the one to read if you don’t know anything about Web Standards at all, it’s intended more to explain the benefits of Standards compliant web design rather than being a how-to manual with extensive code.

It does have some code examples but it doesn’t go too deep so it serves as a great primer for those beginning to get a feel for CSS and XHTML.
It’s written well and is not a dry technical manual but interesting to read.


Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook
by Dan Cederholm

Picture of Web Standards Solutions book jacketFor those who’ve read the first book and have gotten hooked then this next book is a great way to move forwards. There’s lot’s of practical code examples which relate to real world usage, it gives solutions that can be applied to give great results.

Like the book above it’s well written and fun to read with simple explanations, perfect for extending your Web Standards knowledge.


Bulletproof Web Design: Improving Flexibility and Protecting Against Worst-Case Scenarios with XHTML and CSS
by Dan Cederholm

Picture of Bulletproof Web Design book jacket The next book follows on from the previous book and focuses on ‘bulletproof’ techniques to use in building your sites.

Lot’s of clear code examples that compare traditional methods of site design with the benefits of creating the same layout using Standards compliant techniques. It’s written well like Dan’s first book and really gives a great overview of some brilliant techniques to apply to the website that you build.


DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model
by J.Keith

Picture of DOM Scripting book jacketThe title of this book might sound a little ominous, maybe all of them do?!?! This book is a great companion to the rest in that as the other books deal more with Standards Compliant CSS and XHTML this book focuses on Standards Compliant Javascript coding.

It’s a great book aimed at web designers rather than programmers so it’s an excellent way to get into the power that the DOM and Javascript can offer.


These are all great books that I regularly dip in and out of, they’ve really helped me get a better understanding of all the benefits of Standards Compliant website design as well as how to practically put it into practice.

~Rick